A positive review from a local critic declaring the film “a satisfyingly taut suspenser.”  By A. Long

A positive review from a local critic declaring the film “a moody horror/thriller elevated by deft staging and the director's well-known narrative gamesmanship.”  By A. Long

Promotion of Signs.  By A. Long

To keep the film within Pennsylvania, Shyamalan orders casting calls in local cities.  By A. Long

M. Night Shyamalan targets an ordinary audience. He wants to make a cross-generational movie for everyone from parents, children, grandchildren. Shyamalan uses his vision to transform a B-movie genre of alien invasion into an emotional tale of faith and belief. The film’s prevailing theme of the resilience of the human spirit led critics to interpret the film as almost a response to September 11^th.  By A. Long

While the director stays close to Philadelphia for personal reasons of family and preference, the new location creates a more organic space for filmmaking, spurring more original ideas. For the set of the farm, Shyamalan rented 100 acres of fields at the Delaware Valley College to plant 40-acres of corn and construct an entire farmhouse. After the movie’s production, the house was torn down and all of the corn was donated to the school. The director claims to deliberately focus the settings of his plots in the Philadelphia-area (for example Bucks County and the Eastern State Penitentiary).  By A. Long

M. Night Shyamalan attended school in an upscale Episcopalian institution in suburban Philadelphia. Instead of film focusing on crop circles and the simple alien supernatural, the director constructs a narrative of a higher supernatural to center on themes on faith and miracles. By A. Long

M. Night Shyamalan further centers the film’s themes on lost faith and later redemption of the protagonist Graham Hess. He connects worship beyond just the characters, but into a more self-conscious worship of cinema, the motivation of audiences to repeatedly attend screenings in movie theatres. Whether in reverence or otherwise, the director cleverly uses silence as a device for plot and representation.  By A. Long

Signs is shot in various locations in the Philadelphia area, mainly Doylestown, Morrisville, and Newtown. M. Night Shyamalan has a close association with these locations as his home is in close proximity, in Gladwyne, PA. Perhaps his own connections with the setting as well as the narrative was the cause of his devastation when his earlier film Unbreakable failed to connect well with audiences.  By A. Long